Joachim Breitner's Homepage

A few times last year I was asked to help out with some software project – debugging a particularly gnarly nix issue, helping with GHC internals or reviewing Canister code of applications running on the Internet Computer. Usually, these are relatively small jobs, at least reasonably interesting, and it was often friends that approached me.

So I do want to help.

But I did not want to help for free. Incentives matter, and I wanted to incentivize careful use of my time. And of course I like to see my work valued. So normally, one would just charge an hourly fee.

But having to go through all the necessary legalese (setting up a contract, maybe an NDA, thinking about taxes and liabilities, possibly getting permission from the current employer) tilts the scale and would not made it worth it for me anymore.

But instead of just turning it down, a few times now already I used the following model: pro-charity consulting, where you still pay for what you get, but you don’t pay me, but instead a charity.

The rules of pro-charity consulting

The rough rules are as follows:

• There is no contract. I trust you and you trust me, else we wouldn’t even be doing this.
• There is no liability. You probably have a rough idea of what I can deliver and you trust me, so you don’t get to sue me if I screw up.
• There is (usually) no NDA. Of course I’ll keep your secrets, but again you don’t get to sue me if I screw up.
• I tell you about my usual hourly rate if this was a commercial agreement. (This may depend a lot on the field I’m helping you in.)
• Afterwards I’ll also let you know how much time I have spend on helping you.
• You’ll make a donation on a charity of our choosing. We’ll pick something that we both find worth supporting.
• You can donate whatever the work was worth to you, but the expectation is that it shouldn’t be cheaper for you than if you’d have hired me commercially. (Unless I failed to fulfill your expectations.)
• Legally, the donation is by you (e.g. you get to keep any tax benefits).
• Morally, it is by me. For example if donations can come with a message (like on https://donate.openstreetmap.org/) it would be appreciated to mention me.
• According to the German saying “Tue Gutes und rede darüber!” we both get to brag about this donation (target charity, amount, client, kind of work), e.g. on Blogs, Mastodon, Twitter, unless we have a different agreement. See below for some examples.

I’m writing the rules out here so that I can just point to this blog post when I next have to explain this scheme.

Pro-charity gigs so far

• April 2022: 3000€ to the Haskell Foundation for helping the Active Group with a GHC Plugin issue (my tweet, their tweet)
• August 2022: 50€ to the NixOS Foundation for helping FinDeck with a Nix issue (my tweet)
• September 2022: 1400€ to Reporters without Borders for helping StalkedICP by reviewing their Motoko code (my tweet, their tweet)
• September 2022: 1100€ to Amnesty International for helping btcflower by reviewing their Motoko code (their tweet)
• January 2023: 1050$ to Mediciens sans Borders for helping finterest.ooo by reviewing their Motoko code
• March 2023: 1046$ to UNICEF for helping CycleOps by reviewing their Motoko code (my toot, my tweet, their tweet)
• May 2023: 10000$ to OPLSS for implemeting a Motoko-related bug bounty by ICDevs. (blog post, my toot, my tweet)